Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

Elaborating later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”

I highly doubt that the children had "never previously seen printed materials", and there's likely some exaggeration in this story. But, if even half of it is true, it's still a pretty fascinating experiment. The effect of burgeoning technological innovation, and especially its influence on children, is going to be very interesting going forward. On a larger scale, at this point in time, information is free, and we should all hope that it stays that way.

Be highly suspicious of that said by anyone seeking funding. He drops a lot of information about total rubbish unrelated to the goal of literacy (number of apps used on average, desktop customization, cameras, etc), and very little about actual literacy educational results (oh, some kid wrote "lion" in a paint program, and maybe at some point the ABC song was sung).

Sure, initiatives like these need funding, but that doesnt mean their development & promotion is all smoke & mirrors. There seems to be real potential for cost-effective enhanced education, especially where little or none currently exists.